“The Parade” in THE JEWISH ADVOCATE

The playwright and his onstage persona

By Jules Becker – Monday September 17 2007

    Thanks to re-discovered and newly staged plays, the stature of Tennessee Williams as a playwright and a human being continues to rise.
Just a few seasons ago, Broadway and Boston premieres of his compelling 1938 prison drama “Not About Nightingales” provided striking insight into themes to be developed fully in such masterworks as “The Glass Menagerie” and “A Streetcar Named Desire” (parts of which were written during Williams’ time on Cape Cod).
The dramatist’s prescient 1937 social protest play “Candles to the Sun,” now in consideration for staging, centers on coal miners, a subject as familiar as the latest headlines. Now “The Parade” or “Approaching the End of Summer,” an affecting autobiographical 1940 work revised in 1962 and returning to the Provincetown Theater after a world premiere there last fall, reveals not only Williams’ candor about being gay but also his singular relationship with a Jewish New Yorker named Ethel Elkovsky.
Williams must have been very fond of Elkovsky, for Miriam, the character based on her, is clearly the most vivid and fully developed in “The Parade.” Under no illusions about the sexual orientation of Don, the playwright’s alter ego, yet very much in love with him, Miriam champions his mind and future as a writer (as Elkovsky did with Williams), yet never wallows in sentimentality. In fact, with the wit and wisdom of an Oscar Levant, she confronts reality with humor and understanding. Eventually, Miriam predicts, she will marry “a nice Jewish boy” who observes the laws of “kosher cuisine” complete with bagels and lox.
Miriam even suspects that her future husband will avoid the writings of German authors such as Rilke, whose poetry she fondly recalls reading with Don. She invokes Jewish principles of helping children and safeguarding posterity.
For his part, Don displays remarkable tenderness and caring with Miriam. Moving beyond simple warmth and deep friendship in the Provincetown-set play, he goes as far as caressing her and expressing the wish that he could love her as romantically as a straight man would. Arrestingly, Don details the kind of erotic arousal that would fulfill Miriam’s desire and stunningly describes man and woman as two converging rivers. Still, the 29-year-old playwright knows that his heart lies with 22-year-old Dick, patterned on the real-life Canadian dancer Kip Kiernan with whom Williams shared a brief affair until the arrival of Dick’s girlfriend, Wanda. Although Dick speaks of being straight, Miriam contends otherwise and counsels him to be kind to Don. (Here, too, the characters’ actions and relationships resemble the actual ones).
Company artistic director Eric Powell Holm, who co-directed the world premiere last year, sharply paces the banter between Miriam and Don, and smartly balances these faster stretches with slower moments of tenderness between the close friends. Ben Griessmeyer captures all of Don’s frustration with spurning Dick and his sensitivity with Miriam. Whitney Hudson, as Miriam, has just the right mixture of unaffected sophistication and emotional expansiveness.
    Elliot Eustis catches Dick’s unattractive self-absorption as well as his unbounded confidence. Williams felt that Kiernan resembled the legendary dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. Eustis makes them properly humorous as much as well-executed. Elizabeth Stahlmann is fittingly fastidious as Wanda, and Bob Seaver tired as an older Postman.
Is the brief play (about an hour) a surprise treasure? While it has winning quips and exchanges and Williams’ trademark metaphors and poetry-vivid images of elephants and the symbolic title procession, among them, “The Parade” lacks the haunting cumulative force of fellow memory play “Menagerie.” Even so, this relatively minor but heartfelt effort works as an evocation of Williams’ own struggle to balance full physical love and the heights of artistic self-realization.
Most importantly of all, it offers up radiant Miriam, a proudly Jewish character as feisty and warm as earthy innkeeper Maxine in the playwright’s last great work, the 1961 “The Night of the Iguana.” For these pleasures alone, the New Provincetown Players’ richly moving “The Parade” brings a timely end to summer.

Note: The second annual Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival runs Sept. 26-30 at the Provincetown Theatre. For a full schedule of events, go to http://www.twptown.org.

Love a “Parade”

 

By Rebecca M. Alvin

GateHouse News Service

Thu Jul 26, 2007, 02:01 PM EDT

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Orleans – By In 1940, a 29-year-old Tennessee Williams wrote “The Parade, or Approaching the End of a Summer.” More than 20 years later, the playwright revised and published it, but it was only last year that the play had its world premiere, right here in Provincetown. Shakespeare on the Cape, the first company to perform it, has now brought back this one-act tale of unrequited love. Despite its short length (roughly 45 minutes), “The Parade” is a striking piece.
The lead is a young playwright named Don (Ben Griessmeyer), a clear stand-in for Williams himself. The object of his affections is Dick (Elliot Eustis), a young, straight dancer who is going with Wanda (Elizabeth Stahlmann). Meanwhile, Don’s close friend Miriam (Whitney Hudson) finds herself in love with him, despite his open homosexuality. Although this is essentially the plot, there is more to it, as suggested by its title. “The Parade” is about a certain period in one’s life when the summer is about to end, when real life sets in and fantasies subside.
Eustis is delightful as the dopey Dick, who fancies himself a highly talented dancer and choreographer, but really appears to be a narcissistic dolt. We’ve all met this guy – the one who is truly fascinated with himself and gets away with it because of his good looks. Griessmeyer is charming, connecting with Don’s youthful self-obsessiveness, as well as his intelligence and authentic desires.
It is interesting to see a play by Williams that affirms the author’s homosexuality. So many of Williams’ finest plays work as they do not in spite of his closeted sexuality, but because of it. Here, we see another layer to Williams. “The Parade” is not a play borne of Williams’ struggle to express himself without alienating the largely homophobic audiences of his time. Instead, it is a play borne of a young man’s struggles to accept the pace of real life, the unfairness of it, and the blessing and curse of having talent and potential.
Shakespeare on the Cape departs here from its usual focus on the works of the bard, showing that it can do other styles of theater. “The Parade” may be short, but it doesn’t need more than it has. It is an elegantly constructed slice of life.
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“Parade” Finally Has Its Day – [Provincetown.com]

Ben Griessmeyer and Elliot Eustis.

”Parade” Finally Has Its Day

In the Hands of Shakespeare on the Cape

By Kahrin Deines
July 25th, 2007

Almost seventy years ago, Tennessee Williams fell in love in Provincetown. He was young, only twenty-nine at the time, at the beginning of his creative career, and still tentative in his identities as both a writer and a gay man.

Directed by Eric Powell Holm, who has directed most of SOTC’s productions over its three summers of existence, the play is performed by the theater company with a powerful simplicity.

Williams and his love, a young dancer, lived in a small shack on Captain Jack’s Wharf for about six weeks, but in the end the dancer left him for a woman. It was an experience that burned Williams deeply, enough so that he turned the pen to its description and understanding. What emerged, the start of a one-act play that stings with its honest exposition of the ache of unrequited love, was set aside by Williams soon after the summer. A friend made sure it was saved and Williams decided to finish it some twenty-two years later, but it was still never performed until last year, when the young theater company Shakespeare on the Cape was tapped to perform its world premiere as part of the first annual Tennessee Williams Festival in Provincetown.

Now, Shakespeare on the Cape is performing the short 50-minute play every Wednesday at the Provincetown Theater. In the play, a young writer named Don falls in love with Dick, a narcissistic and impassive young dancer, who revels in his attentions but hides from his own homosexuality, ultimately spurning Don for an adoring female consort, Wanda.

Elliot Eustis, in the background, and Ben Griessmeyer.

Directed by Eric Powell Holm, who has directed most of SOTC’s productions over its three summers of existence, the play is performed by the theater company with a powerful simplicity. Ben Griessmeyer carries the story as Don, playing this complex character – Williams’ avatar in the story – with real power as a talented and too sensitive man, at turns self-destructive and resentful as he tethers his loss, but also inspired and empathic. Elliot Eustis is the unwilling lover Dick, an unsympathetic character that he plays with a kind of studied ambivalence that radiates internal conflict. Meanwhile, Whitney Hudson truly shines as Miriam, Don’s true friend and would-be lover; Elizabeth Stahlmann is a lovely Wanda; and Bob Seaver brings it all to a close as the tired postman.

For setting, there is only a wooden deck, which is where the mail is dropped for this beach outpost daily, but also where Dick does his dancing and the play’s plot spins out. Befitting the simple setting, this is not a plot of present action, but rather a story that rides on conversation as the characters approach the end of a long summer and look forward to their futures. It thus seems like a crystallized moment, with all of the restlessness and languor engendered by too many days on the beach, but also the anxiety of a turning point as the characters prepare to part and close the summer, alone and with uncertain hopes.

As Miriam complains, the many beautiful beach days have become monotonous, like so many perfectly golden beads in a necklace and the play’s dialogue is much the same – not monotonous, but moving from one lovely turn of phrase to the next that together close a summer’s losses and hopes into a meaningful circle.

‘Boys Will Be Girls, and Girls Will Be Boys’ – In Newsweekly

William Henderson July 19, 2007 Boys will be girls and girls will be boys GENDER-BENDING CASTING ON DISPLAY IN SUMMER SHAKESPEARE ON THE CAPE PRODUCTIONS

In 2005, its inaugural season, Shakespeare on the Cape performed in an experimental space at The Schoolhouse Gallery. Their productions of “Twelfth Night” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” drew more than 1,000 patrons and were heaped with critical praise. That next year, the company entered its second season with expanded programming and greater community support, including grants from charitable organizations such as The Provincetown Tourism Fund and The Arts Foundation of Cape Cod. That season include 33 performances of “Romeo & Juliet” and “As You Like It” at The Art House. Also, the company took the performances on the road throughout Cape Cod to Wellfleet, Woods Hole, Harwich and Nantucket, a tour that culminated in a 10-day repertory run at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. The Guthrie run may have grown the company’s audience, and grow it it did, but it also was a homecoming of sorts for company co-founders Elliot Eustis and Eric Holm, who met while enrolled at the Guthrie and decided after graduation that nothing made more sense than starting a theater company in Provincetown, the town where Eustis had summered since he was 8-years-old. Holm needed a bit more convincing, having only been to Provincetown for a four-day stretch during Carnival. But once the decision was made, he said during a recent telphone interview, there has been neither need to look back or regret not picking anywhere else in which to build their company. “We’ve found some amazing support here,” said Holm. Such support includes not only the financial backing of a number of local organizations, but also its new partnerships with The Provincetown Players and the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater. This summer, the Players are co-producing two SOTC productions – “Much Ado About Nothing” and “Parade” – while the Actors Theater is co-producing the SOTC production of Moliere’s first comic masterpiece, “The School for Wives.” Guy Wolf, producing artistic director of The Provincetown Players, calls “Ado” “incredible.” “This production is physical, hysterical and athletic and, per usual, boys will be girls and girls will be boys,” he quipped in a recent press statement. The gender-bending casting, said Holm, is part of the company’s mission. Formed initially to create clear, text-intensive productions with a dedication to emerging artists and to cultivate a strong relationship with the Cape Cod community, the company has a tendency to cast its productions with men and women playing roles written for someone of the opposite gender. “Classical actors are like violinists. It’s not about what they look like. It’s about their willingness to tackle a role and part,” said Holm. “Shakespeare on the Cape is about fulfilling dreams, so the guy who says, I’ve always wanted to play Cleopatra but I’m a guy, well, he’ll get his chance to be Cleopatra.” “The Parade, or Approaching the End of a Summer” by Tennessee Williams also has a history with the company. Performed on October 1, 2006 as part of the First Annual Tennessee Williams Festival, this enchanting one-act play focuses on the four years Williams spent in Provincetown during the 1940s. “The Williams production represented our first step away from Shakespeare, and set the stage for a wide range of productions by many great writers,” said Holm. Holm says that the play brings to the foreground the beauty of Provincetown and how, as summer comes to an end, there’s a tension that develops between the beauty and charm of the town and the expectant way shops shut their doors and the population of the town drastically shifts. It’s a play that Tennessee Williams refused to stage while he was alive, as it deals with a relationship he had with a “straight” dancer. Holm thinks the play is great and is directing this production. Holm can’t say much yet about “The School for Wives.” It’s still in rehearsal and doesn’t open until July 29. But expect much of the same stellar performances for which the company, in just three short seasons, has become known. Rounding out their summer schedule will be a special production of “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” scaled down and geared to the tween set. Said production, running during Provincetown Family week, has a running time of just 30 minutes, features a narrator who directs the action and serves as an easy-to-understand introduction to the works of William Shakespeare. Get Holm talking long enough and it becomes clear that this production holds a special place in the company’s metaphorical heart. “It’s so magical. There’s the creating of the fairies and the magical flower juice which makes people fall in love. There’s a real lightness to it that a lot of other Shakespeare plays don’t have,” said Holm. “Also, there are things that are accessible to children in that comedy that might not be in other comedies that are more about love and sex and romance.” Not to mention politics, which Holm is already wrapping his mind around in selecting next season’s Shakespeare selections. “I want to get political next year as it’s an election year,” said Holm. “I don’t know how we’ll do it, but we’ll figure it out.” •

“In Provincetown, a Lovesick Tennessee Williams Finds His Voice” – Provincetown Banner

Elliot Eustis (dancing) is the not-quite-unobtainable object of desire in Tennessee Williams’ “The Parade.” The Williams-like character Don is played by Ben Griessmeyer. Tennessee Williams finds his voice By Susan Rand Brown Banner Correspondent Like Eugene O’Neill a quarter century earlier, the young Tennessee Williams arrived in Provincetown in 1940 to hike the dunes and swim, to see and be seen, and to write. Both writers were intensely autobiographical, setting characters loose on stage to wrestle with inner demons resembling their own. Williams spent four different time periods in Provincetown, the first when he shared quarters with a young dancer at Captain Jack’s Wharf. Williams was 26 that summer, just starting to taste professional success, suffering shyness and insecurity. The affair was intense, its break-up equally so. When the dancer abandoned him for a woman, Williams poured out his pain, his fury, his pride and especially his poetry in “The Parade, Or Approaching the End of a Summer.” The one-act gem played to sold-out houses when it had its world premiere in Provincetown last fall, the capstone to the first Tennessee Williams Festival. Now back in town as one of two summer productions by Shakespeare on the Cape, the company affiliated with the University of Minnesota /Guthrie Theater BFA Actor Training Program, the match of script and cast remains perfect. Unlike the plays by the young O’Neill, whose characters can barely speak, “The Parade” is evidence that Williams was gifted with a silver tongue. Excitement over its production is less for its novelty as an apprentice piece from a playwright who went on to lasting fame (today Williams is read and produced more frequently than O’Neill) than it is for its emotional impact, honest discussion of sexual attraction, and of course for those flights of poetic fancy Williams spins out like no one else. Shortly after scribbling “The Parade” into one of his many notebooks, Williams tossed it aside; a friend rescued it from oblivion and held on to it. Two decades later, Williams agreed to finish the script, leaving intact the sounds of spontaneous speech and the candor with which he approached gay identity. In “The Parade,” Williams can be seen shaping but not censoring his often outrageous persona. Returning in their Williams Festival roles, Shakespeare on the Cape veterans Ben Griessmeyer and Elliot Eustis are a joy to watch. As Williams’ alter ego, the lovesick poet Don, Griessmeyer turns on a dime between lassitude, self-directed humor, and charm. Expressiveness is one of Greissmeyer’s strengths: watch him bat his eyes and flash a turned-up smile to be smitten by Williams’ own charisma. As the narcissistic dancer who preens for Don while keeping him at a distance, Elliot Eustis is convincing as the aptly named Dick. It’s a challenging role: Dick is a closeted, deluded youth with limited talents, and Eustis endows him with the supreme confidence of the foolish. He flaunts his girlfriend Wanda, a small role played with flair by Elizabeth Stahlmann, until the heartsick Don can take it no more. In the role of the nurturing urbanite Miriam, Whitney Hudson creates a sympathetic sounding board as hopelessly gaga over Don as Don is over Dick. The parade in question is, of course, shorthand for the peak moment that never seems to arrive. When Griessmeyer’s Don utters his final words about the dying of the light, we can’t help but project ahead to the arc of Williams’ life, its triumphs and periods of despair. In “The Parade,” he may be looking for love in all the wrong places, but the journey is still ahead. This is a play, and a production, not to be missed. “The Parade, Or Approaching The End Of a Summer,” performed by Shakespeare on the Cape, plays at the Provincetown Theater, 238 Bradford Street, Provincetown, Wednesdays at 7:30 p.m. through September 5. Tickets are $25, $22 for New Provincetown Players members, students, and seniors. For tickets, call 508-487-9793, or 1-800-791-7487.

“Parade” Captures Poignancy of Hope Passed By

     

“Parade” Captures Poignancy of Hope Passed By

By DEBBIE FORMAN
STAFF WRITER
July 14, 2007

PROVINCETOWN — Tennessee Williams’ poetic and lyrical dialogue, which created such beauty in his mature plays, skips languidly across his early one-act “The Parade, or Approaching the End of a Summer.” And the actors of Shakespeare on the Cape eloquently project the youthful restlessness and melancholy of the characters, who are wistfully discussing unrequited love and aspirations for success.

Williams began writing “Parade” in Provincetown in 1940, but didn’t finish it. More than 20 years later, he picked it up and completed it — but its conclusion seems awkward and abrupt. The play is interesting because it gives early signs of Williams’ greatness (before he burst onto the scene with “The Glass Menagerie” and “A Streetcar Named Desire”), and the Shakespeare company does it credit.

The company first presented the play last year at the Tennessee Williams festival in Provincetown, and it is being performed again every Wednesday night throughout the summer at the Provincetown Theater.

“Parade” is set at the end of a summer by the sea and is permeated with a sense of loss, not only for the vanishing summer but for the hopes that have gone unrealized.

Based on Williams’ relationship with Kip Kiernan in the summer of 1940 in Provincetown, the play revolves around Don (representing Williams), who is a playwright striving for a Broadway breakthrough. He has fallen for Dick, a dancer who is also looking toward Broadway and the chance for an audition. Dick spurns Don; he contends he is not gay and is therefore repulsed by Don’s overtures, but it’s not clear if that is the real reason. Given the era, it may be that Dick has not yet come to terms with his sexual identity.

Miriam, a wealthy young woman who reads Rilke and Kant, has grown bored with the summer and is ready to depart. She tries to comfort Don, encouraging him to find a more responsive and deserving object for his affection. But Don only has eyes for Dick. Miriam, it seems, yearns for Don, and he expresses platonic affection for her, but no passion. Despite that, Williams manages to introduce erotic notes into the scene as he imagines a lover for Miriam.

Most of this 50-minute play is the conversation between Miriam and Don. Ben Griessmeyer brings authenticity and passion to his role as Don. We feel the yearning and torment of a young homosexual in love with a man who rejects him.

Whitney Hudson is the practical, sensitive Miriam. Hudson’s characterization is so natural, so easy that you feel you’re standing nearby that little boardwalk over the sand eavesdropping on this intimate conversation. Miriam’s efforts to soothe Don and encourage him to look elsewhere for affection bring him little comfort. Dick, she says, is self-absorbed and a fool, hardly worthy of Don’s attentions. Don moans, “The sun is so bright today it makes me feel like a shadow.” And there are shadows playing against the backdrop.

Don complains that he feels empty, and Miriam coaxes him to fill the vacuum with work, but Don protests it’s only love that can make him whole.

Elliot Eustis does well as the shallow Dick, endlessly practicing his dancing while he ignores Don’s advances. Elizabeth Stahlmann has a small role as Wanda, Dick’s girlfriend, who patiently runs the Victrola while he dances.

Eric Powell Holm directs with sensitivity to the beauty of the dialogue. These are Williams’ words, which so poignantly call forth passion, heartbreak and nostalgic images of a long-lost summer.

FLASHBACK!! “The Parade” Premiere 2006 Provincetown

“The Parade” Premier 2006 Province Town

Originally uploaded by zookeeperwendy

So I found that my Mom had this photo on her Flickr account. Her username is “zookeeperwendy” if you’re interested– haha.

It’s funny to look back on this photo and try to imagine how I was feeling right then and there…

XO